As the importance of our data continues to grow, so does our need to scale its use, be it for performance, resilience or reasons of data locality, the need to architect solutions and find technologies to support this demand for data at scale is increasingly important.
If we look at the way cloud giants such as Facebook, Netflix, Spotify etc. need to use their data, it’s clear that “traditional” database methods are not going to be suitable and of course it’s not just “cloud giants” who need their data at scale, today, enterprises of all types need to be able to present their data with the same scale, flexibility and resilience.
One widely adopted way of doing this is using Apache Cassandra as a database technology. But why? and how does Cassandra differ from our traditional on-prem solutions such as SQL and Oracle?
That is the topic of this week’s Tech Interviews as Patrick Callaghan, Solutions Architect at Datastax joins me to provide an intro to Cassandra as a database technology, how it works and why it’s becoming the database of choice in the modern webscale world.
In a fascinating chat, Patrick provides background into Cassandra and its beginnings at Facebook, we look at its architectural design and what has driven the need for highly available, highly scalable, geographically spread data repositories and also consider the challenges of consistency, synchronisation and management that such an architecture introduces.
We also discuss how automation is not necessarily the thing you want when it comes to scale, do you really want to be automating scale-out at your busiest time? Patrick also shares some use cases, why you may want to look at distributed webscale databases and what you need to consider before you do? We finish up with a look at Datastax and how they can help you to take advantage of Cassandra from support to managed services.
Patrick is a great guest and provided a fantastic intro to the world of Cassandra and what it can mean for the way we handle data in this distributed, webscale world.
For more info on Datastax check out the Datastax Academy you can also find our more from Patrick on Twitter @patcho2005 and on Linkedin.
Next week we start a brief series talking with Cloud Architects and Migration specialists about making a success of Public Cloud Projects, too make sure you catch that show then please subscribe in all of the usual podcast places and until next time, Thanks for listening.
Techstringy 